sedition

12 January 2021

Sedition has a rather straightforward etymology; it’s from the Latin seditio, via the Anglo-Norman sediciun. The Latin word literally means a going apart; the se- prefix, denoting separation, can also be seen in secession and separate. And the -it- is a form of the verb ire, meaning to go. That’s the literal meaning Latin, but the word was used to refer to insurrection or civil discord, or in poetic works to strife or quarrel.

The Latin word appears in Anglo-Latin texts by the eighth century. In one glossary it is defined as:

Seditio . perturbata . simulatio.

(Sedition:  pretenses/deceits that cause discord)

And it appears as a definition in another entry:

Tumultus . seditio.

(rebellion: sedition.)

But the word is not used in English until the 1380s, when it was borrowed or influenced by the Anglo-Norman sediciun, meaning treachery. It appears in a Wycliffite translation of the biblical book Deeds 24 (Acts 24) in a passage about Paul’s trial before Felix. Here sedition is being used in the sense of violent civil strife or dissension:

We han founden this man beringe venym, or pestilence, and stiringe sedicioun, or dissencioun, to alle Jewis in al the world, and auctour of seducioun of the secte of Nazarens; the which also enforside for to defoule the temple; whom and takun to, we wolden deme, aftir oure lawe.

(We have found this man bearing venom, or pestilence, and stirring sedition, or dissention, to all Jews in the all the world, and author of the sedition of the sect of the Nazarenes, which also undertook to defile the temple, whom we have taken and would judge under our law.)

The Vulgate Bible uses seditio in this passage.

By c.1450 sedition was being used to mean insurrection when it appears in a translation of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus (Of Famous Women) in a passage about Medea:

And, whan she saw hym, forthwith, anon-right
Hir feith and trouth to hym she dydde plyght:
Cupydo ys bronde so sore had hir inflamed,
That hym to folow she was no-thynge ashamed,

But stale out priuely of hir faders lond
And— ȝit wele wersse—made a sedicyon
Ageyns hir fader with powere and stronge honde,
The comunalte to make an insurreccion,
That she and and hir dereward luf Jason
Myght eskape, vnknowynge the kynge,
Whyle he was occupyed in werfarynge .

(And when she was him, forthwith and instantly, she pledged her faith and troth to him: Cupid’s torch had inflamed her so fervently that she was in no way ashamed to follow him but stole out of her father’s land secretly. And—yet more sinfully—She made a sedition against her father with a powerful and strong hand. The nation to make an insurrection, so that she and her then-dear love Jason might escape without the king knowing, while he was occupied in warfare.)

The general sense of violent strife or dissension dropped out of use in the seventeenth century, leaving the sense of insurrection, and particular inciting an insurrection, as the sense in use today.

In the United States today, there is no crime of sedition, per se, but there is a crime of seditious conspiracy. 18 U.S. Code § 2384 — Seditious Conspiracy reads:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

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Sources:

“18 U.S. Code § 2384 — Seditious Conspiracy.” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, accessed 11 January 2021.

Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND1), 1992, s.v. sedicun.

Deeds 24. The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments, with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions, vol. 4 of 4. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1850, 579. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Douce MS 369. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013, s.v. seditio. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Hessels, Jan Hendrik. An Eighth-Century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1890, 107, 117. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 144. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1879, s.v. seditio. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. sedicioun, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. sedition, n., se-, prefix.

Schleich, Gustav. "Die Mittelenglische Umdichtung von Boccaccios De claris mulieribus," Palaestra, 144, 1924, lines 1320–30, 65. London, British Library, Additional 10304. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

honky

11 January 2021

Today, we know honky as an Americanism, a contemptuous, Black slang term for a white person. This sense of the term was in its heyday in the 1970s, and while you still encounter it, honky has become less common. But this use in Black slang is only attested from the 1940s, and the term itself dates to the turn of the twentieth century when it referred to immigrants from Eastern Europe, and often appeared in the context of manual or factory laborers. Honky is a variation on Hungarian.

The form hunk is attested on 13 January 1896 in the pages of the New York Herald:

The average Pennsylvanian contemptuously refers to these immigrants as “Hikes” and “Hunks.” The “Hikes” are Italians and Sicilians. “Hunks” is a corruption for Huns, but under this title the Pennsylvanian includes Hungarians, Lithuanians, Slavs, Poles, Magyars and Tyroleans. A writer who recently described a trip to Mars told of the race of Ambau—dwarfed and apelike creatures that performed menial services for the Martian people. The Pennsylvanian regards the Hikes and Hunks as far below Ambau.

The form bohunk is attested in 1903, and hunky in 1910.

The honky / honkies spelling appears in the pages of the Railroad Telegrapher in January 1904 in a discussion of unionization of the railroads and the Order of Railroad Telegraphers (O.R.T.):

The men at “CA,” Orrville, say they are getting enough wages now; don’t care to earn any more. They put me in mind of some “honkies” that were working for this road. A contractor came to them and offered them more money. They spokesman stepped forward and said: “We wanti no more job, we maki ‘nough mon.” The three men at “CA” would rather throw levers for two roads and do telegraphing for two roads for they money they are getting now than to join the O.R.T. and do the same amount of work for more money.

The above quotation doesn’t make clear what honkies means, but writing in April 1916 Samuel Gompers, of the American Federation of Labor, uses and explains the term:

These workers have not yet become assimilated and part of our nation. Their outlook is less broad Their conceptions of their own rights and the freedom that ought to be theirs are far less complete than what they should be, but, nevertheless, these foreigners—“Dagoes, Wops, Honkies," call them what you will—are human beings with hearts and souls, and all of them have the natural desires of human beings and infinite possibilities of human development.

The slang of jazz took up the term, and it appears in this context in clarinetist and cannabis aficionado Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow’s 1946 autobiography, Really the Blues:

I’m standing under the Tree of Hope, pushing my gauge. The vipers come up, one by one.

FIRST CAT: Hey there Poppa Mezz, is you anywhere?

ME: Man I'm down with it, stickin' like a honky.

FIRST CAT: Lay a trey on me, ole man.

Mezzrow conveniently supplies a translation of his “jive”:

(I’m standing under the Tree of Hope, selling my marihuana. The customers come up, one by one.

FIRST CAT: Hello Mezz, have you got any marihuana?

ME: Plenty, old man, my pockets are full as a factory hand's on payday.

FIRST CAT: Let me have three cigarettes.)

Note that Mezzrow is still associating honky with “factory hands,” so the term at this point still has class as well as racial connotations.

Mezzrow, who was white and Jewish, was well known for his collaborations with Black musicians, and much of what he himself terms “jive” in his book is Black slang. From the slang of jazz, honky moved into general Black slang. Stokely Carmichael, chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, is recorded as using the term on 10 April 1967, an early appearance of the Black slang usage appearing in a mainstream, White publication:

During the rioting, a newsman asked a group of students: “Why are you doing this?”

One replied: “Because the white people are running our university.” Carmichael, during an appearance here Thursday night, told students: “The honkies—whites—are dictating your lives.”

By the late 1960s honky had lost any class or intra-White ethnic connotations and had simply come to mean a white person.

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Sources:

“Arrested for Mafia Murders.” New York Herald, 13 January 1896, 3. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Davies, Mark. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), 2020.

Gompers, Samuel. “Editorials.” American Federationist, 23.4, April 1916, 280–81. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. honkie, n., bohunk, n., hunky, n.

Mezzrow, Milton “Mezz” and Bernard Wolfe. Really the Blues. New York: Random House, 1946, 216, 354. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Negro Students Battle Cops at Fisk University.” Bridgeport Telegram (Connecticut), 10 April 1967, 4. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2014, s.v. honky, n. and adj.; September 2020, bohunk, n. and adj.; second edition, 1989, s.v. hunk, n.3.

The Railroad Telegrapher, 21.1, January 1904, 85. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

lickspittle

10 January 2021

Lickspittle is an epithet that you don’t hear all that often, although given the large number of them in politics today, perhaps one should hear it more often. The OED classifies it in Frequency Band 3, meaning that it appears less than once per ten million words. (Words with similar frequencies are prelapsarian, agglutinative, dirt-cheap, and badass.) I had thought it might be more frequent in British usage than North American, but it is slightly more frequent on the right side of the pond.

Its etymology is simple, a compound of lick, v. + spittle n., and the metaphor underlying the word is similarly straightforward. A lickspittle is a sycophant or toady, one who figuratively laps up the saliva of their master.

The metaphor appears by 1586 in a commentary on the biblical book of Haggai by John James Gryneus:

Although the former sort of these men haue their fauourers and followers, no lesse then th'other (for there were not wanting in times past, flatterers which did licke the spittle of Dyonisius the tyraunte, and said that it was sweeter then the sweete wine).

But the word itself isn’t recorded until the middle of the eighteenth century. It appears as a name of a character, the Reverend Doctor Lick-Spittle, in the 1755 anonymous play The Misrepresentor Represented. (The play may be older. The publication date is 1755, but the subtitle says, “not performed in this Kingdom since the Year 1715.” Whether or not the subtitle is true is anyone’s guess.)

It appears again as a name in John Carteret Pilkington’s 1760 picaresque autobiography, although in this case the name is a factitious nickname. In an incident rendered in the book as if it were a stage play, Pilkington has a woman label an obsequious man “Timothy Lickspittle,” upon which another woman gives the man’s real name:

KITTY.           Another freeman, I warrant! he wants to inspect the pantry.—Duke (reads) and it may be in your capacity, if it is your inclination, to save from ruin your most obsequious, most devoted, most obliged, most obedient, most—Oh! Lard! I can remember no more, Timothy Lickspittle.

Lady BAB.      Surely you wrongs him, my Lord Duke! let me see, no, faith, 'tis Ricard Gapple, if I can reade.

And by 1766 we see the word being used directly. From another satirical piece that appeared in the London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer of May of that year:

Q. How do officers rise?

A. By merit

Q. How many different kinds of merit are there?

A. Four: the first consists in having a pretty large sum at command; the second, in being son to a nobleman in place; the third in marrying the b——d or wh——e of a G——l O——r, and the last in being a talebearer and lickspittle to the C——l of the r——t one belongs to.

The expurgated words are bastard, whore, General Officer, Colonel, and regiment.

And it is recorded in Francis Grose’s 1796 edition of his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

LICKSPITTLE. A parasite, or talebearer.

Use of lickspittle became more frequent in the nineteenth century, moving out of satire and slang to general discourse. Sadly, it seems to have declined in frequency in the latter half of the twentieth. It is a very useful and often apt word.

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Sources:

“A Constitutional and Political English Catechism. Necessary for All Families.” London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, vol. 35, May 1766, 266. HathiTrustDigital Archive.

Davies, Mark. Corpus of News on the Web (NOW), January 2021.

Grose, Francis. A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, third edition. London: Hooper and Wigstead, 1796.

Gryneus, John James. Haggeus, the Prophet. London: John Wolfe for John Harrison, 1586, C2v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

The Misrepresentor Represented. Dublin, 1755. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. lick-spittle, n.

Pilkington, John Carteret. The Real Story of John Carteret Pilkington. London: 1760, 290. HathiTrustDigital Archive.

honeymoon

Late nineteenth-century, stereographic photo of a honeymoon couple at Niagara Falls, New York

8 January 2021

As the word is used today, a honeymoon is a vacation taken by a newly married couple. The etymology is rather straightforward: honey (i.e., something sweet) + moon (brief period of time). It is also used figuratively to mean a period of good relations or enthusiasm at the beginning of an endeavor, often a political one. But it wasn’t always like this. Initially the word was used with an emphasis on the brevity of the period, which would inevitably wane, just like the moon.

The earliest known use of the term is in a 1546 dialogue by poet and playwright John Heywood, in which he incorporates a large number of aphorisms and clichés, including honeymoon:

Who, the daie of weddyng and after, a while,
Could not loke eche on other, but they must smile.
As a whelpe for wantonnes in and out whipps,
So plaied these tweyne, as mery as thre chipps.
Þe there was god (quoth he) whan all is doone.
Abyde (quoth I) it was yet but hony moone.
The blacke oxe had not trode on his nor her foote.
But er this branche of blys coulde reache any roote,
The floures so faded, that in fiftene weekes,
A man myght espie the chaunge in the cheekes,
Both of this pore wretch, & his wife this pore wenche.
Their faces told toies, þ[at] Totnam was turnd frenche
And all their light laughyng turnd and translated
Into sad syghyng, all myrth was amated.

The emphasis on waning and souring of the couple’s love is repeated in the word’s first appearance in a dictionary, John Higgins’s 1572 revision of Richard Huloet’s dictionary:

Hony moone, a terme prouerbially applied to such as be newe maried, whiche will not fall out at the firste, but th'one loueth the other at the beginning exceadingly, the likelyhode of their exceading loue, appearing to aswage, which time the vulgare people call the hony moone. Aphrodisia, Feriae hymenaeae.

And the figurative use of the term appears by 1579 in a tract about diplomatic relations between England and France by pamphleteer John Stubbes:

It might be honiemoone awhile with them but aftervvard french would be no deinty dish, and these seely interpreters vvere happye if they might quietly stand without the dore.

The sense of a post-wedding vacation doesn’t appear until the end of the eighteenth century, when it appears in William Beckford’s translation of Johann Carl A. Musäus’s The Nymph of the Fountain. Although here the meaning of the word itself is literally that of the initial period of wedded bliss, only in a context of and perhaps with the expectation that it would be spent on a vacation:

The new-married couple spent their honey-moon in Augspurg [sic], in mutual happiness and innocent enjoyments, like the first human pair in the garden of Eden.

Honey-moon here is translating Spieljahr in the German original, which would seem to be a play on words by Musäus, as this is not a standard meaning of the German word, which is typically used to refer to a theatrical or sports season.

Over time, honeymoon the connotation of the loving bliss being temporary has been lost—although retained in the figurative, political sense. The vacation itself, however, is still brief.

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Sources:

Heywood, John. A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue. London: Thomas Berthelet, 1546, 1.7, sig. B4r. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Higgins, John. Huloets Dictionarie Newelye Corrected, Amended, Set in Order and Enlarged. London: Thomas Marshe, 1572. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Musäus, Johann Carl August. “The Nymph of the Fountain.” Popular Tales of the Germans, vol. 2 of 2. William Beckford, trans. London: J. Murray, 1791, 266. Google Books.

Musäus, Johann Karl August. Volksmährchen der Deutschen. vol. 2 of 4. Gotha: Carl Wilhelm Ettinger, 1788, 270. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2014, s.v. honeymoon, n., honeymoon, v.

Stubbes, John. The Discouerie of a Gaping Gulf VVhereinto England Is Like to Be Swallovved by Another French Mariage. London: H. Singleton for W. Page, 1579, sig. D4r.

Photo credit: M. H. Zahner, “Spending their Honeymoon at Niagara,” late nineteenth century, New York Public Library. Public domain in the United States as a mechanical reproduction of a work that was produced before 1925.

hospital

Engraving showing St. Barthomew’s hospital in London as it stood in 1720.

7 January 2021

The English word hospital is a good example of the interplay between English, Latin, and French in the medieval period and how England during that period was, at least among the upper classes, a tri-lingual nation. It also shows the cultural interplay and exchange between predominately Christian Europe and the Muslim world during the medieval period. Hospital comes to us from the Latin hospitalis, a guest house or guest bedroom. As such it is related to hospitality. The word’s association with curing, or at least caring for, the sick and injured occurs rather early, but the sense of the word specifically meaning an institution dedicated to medicine and health doesn’t appear until the start of the early modern period.

We see the Latin hospitalis being used in England during the Old English period. For example, sometime prior to 796 C.E., Alcuin wrote to Eanbald, the archbishop of York:

Consideret quoque tua diligentissima in elemosinis pietas ubi xenodochia, id est hospitalia, fieri iubeas, in quibus sit cotidiana pauperum et peregrinorum susceptio, et ex nostris substantiis habeant.

(Let him consider also your most diligent piety in alms, where you have commanded there to be established waystations, i.e., hospitals, in which there should be the daily reception of paupers and pilgrims, and they should have [means/substance] from our resources.)

But while speakers of Latin knew the word, it was not borrowed into Old English, quite possibly because hosp in Old English meant disgrace or shame. Instead, Old English continued to use native words like inn and gyst-hof.

In the quotation above we see a slight expansion of the traditional meaning of the Latin hospitalis from a guest house or chamber to that of an inn or hostel that had started a century earlier in Rome. In the seventh century, Pope Gregory I had ordered one of the first and the most famous of these hospitals to be founded in Jerusalem for use by Christian pilgrims to that city. But at first it had no association with sick or injured.

In Baghdad in the ninth century, a system of bimaristans (Arabic بِيْمَارِسْتَان) began to care for lepers, eventually becoming places to care for the aged, infirm, and ill throughout the Muslim world. The quarter of Jerusalem which housed the Christian hospital would become known as the Muristan from the bimaristan located there. Pilgrims to Jerusalem would bring back knowledge of the system of bimaristans to Europe. And following the First Crusade (1096–99), in 1120 Raymond de Puy, the head of the order of Knights Hospitallers, expanded the hospital in Jerusalem that had been founded by Gregory centuries before, allowing it to care for the ill based on the Muslim model.

La vie de saint Thomas Becket (The Life of St. Thomas Becket) was penned a few years after Becket’s death, sometime before 1176. And this Anglo-Norman text uses the word hospital to refer to the leprosarium that had been founded c. 1084 by Lanfranc, the archbishop of Canterbury. This leprosarium was in Hambledown, Kent, near Canterbury (now part of that city). Following the murder of Becket, King Henry II enlarged the leprosarium and expanded it to include an alms house for the poor:

Juste Cantorbire unt leprus un hospital,
U mult i ad malades, degez e plains de mal.

(Near Canterbury lepers, outcast and full of illness, have a hospital, where many there have sicknesses.)

And:

E a un hospital, bien dons liwes de la,
A herberchier les povres, li reis ne s’ublia:
Kar de rente a cel liu par au cent sols dona.

(The king did not forget to give refuge to the poor with a hospital, an easy distance from the place: for he gave one hundred shillings for the rent for this place for a year.)

England during this period was trilingual, with the aristocracy speaking both French and English, and the clergy adding Latin to the mix. So, while we don’t have English-language examples of hospital from this period, the word probably would have been familiar to those who only spoke English as well.

But we don’t see hospital appear in English for another century or so. The poem Richard Coer de Lyon, written sometime before 1300, makes reference to the hospital in Jerusalem:

The kynge of Fraunce, without wene,
Lay in the cyté of Messene,
And Kynge Rycharde without the wall,
Under the house of the Hospytall.

And shortly later, c. 1300, the life of Becket in the South English Legendary references the hospital near Canterbury:

He com aȝen þulke hous · as þis Gilberd inne was
And sein Thomas was suþþe þerinne ibore · gracious was þat cas
Þat is nou an ospital · irered of sein Thomas

(He came again to this house, as this Gilbert was within
And Saint Thomas was then brought inside, gracious was that situation,
That is now a hospital, established because of Saint Thomas.)

Still, during this period, hospitals, while they might incidentally care for lepers or those who were otherwise ill, aged, or infirm, were not dedicated to their care, remaining primarily almshouses or temporary lodgings for travelers.

It isn’t until the mid sixteenth century that we see hospital being used to refer to an institution dedicated solely to medical care. In 1546, Henry VIII re-endowed the old monastic Hospital of Saint Bartholomew in London, providing funds to provide medical care for one hundred indigent people. This is reflected in the preface to the The Ordre of the Hospital of S. Bartholomewes, published in 1552:

It is better knowen by reaporte vnto the nombre, then weyghed in effect almoste to any, that for the relief of the sore and sicke of the citie of London, It pleased the Kinges Maiestie, of famous memorie, Henry London poor and the eight (father to this our moste drad souereigne sick, lorde nowe reignyng) to erecte an hospitall in West Smithfield, for the continual relief & help of an .C. patients, sore and diseased.

That’s how a traveler’s waystation or hostel became a hospital.

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Sources:

Alcuin. “Epistola ad Enbadum archiepiscopum.” Two Alcuin Letter Books. Colin Chase, ed. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studes, 1975, 69. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2018.

Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence. La vie de saint Thomas Becket. Emmanuel Walberg, ed. Lund, Sweden: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1922, 200. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Larkin, Peter, ed. Richard Coer de Lyon. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. 2015, lines 1765–68.

Mill, Anna Jean and Charlotte D’Evelyn, eds. “St. Thomas A Becket.” The South English Legendary, vol. 2 of 2. Early English Text Society, 236. London: Oxford UP, 1956, lines 82–84, 613.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. hospital, n.

“Preface.” The Ordre of the Hospital of S. Bartholomewes in West Smythfielde in London. London: R. Grafton, 1552, A.2r–v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Benjamin Cole, 1720, Wellcome Collection Gallery; used under a  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Thanks to Jessica Lockhart and Suzanne Akbari for assistance in the translations. Any errors are mine alone.